The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

It was agreed that the Queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar with the few followers who remained to him. Mary took leave of her first and last master with passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies, and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand" she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner representing the corpse of Darnley, with her child beside it, invoking on his knees the retribution of divine justice.

From the violence of a multitude, in which women of the worst class were more furious than the men, she was sheltered in the house of the provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the 20th a silver casket containing letters and French verses, miscalled sonnets, in the handwriting of the Queen, was taken from the person of a servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to Dunbar. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his accession to the English throne—even in these possibly disfigured versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention of art.

Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven, and Sir Robert Melville were despatched to Lochleven, there to obtain the Queen's signature to an act of abdication in favor of her son, and another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and a commission of regency was established till the return from France of Murray, who, on August 15th, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athol. According to his own account the expostulations as to her past conduct which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears, confessions, and attempts at extenuation or excuse; but when they parted next day on good terms, she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for bedfellows. Their mother and the Regent's, her father's former mistress, was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm. A rumor transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun in France.

It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on March 25, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterward remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and perplexity to herself, succeeded on May 2d in assisting her to escape by a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland, where George Douglas, Lord Seton, and others were awaiting her. Thence they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton palace, round which an army of six thousand men was soon assembled, and whither the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The Queen's abdication was revoked, messengers were despatched to the English and French courts, and word was sent to Murray at Glasgow that he must resign the regency, and should be pardoned in common with all offenders against the Queen. But on the day when Mary arrived at Hamilton, Murray had summoned to Glasgow the feudatories of the crown, to take arms against the insurgent enemies of the infant King.